Holly Kyte marvels at Andrea Levy’s ability to turn the subject of
slavery into a life-affirming entertainment
.

In The Long Song, Andrea Levy explores her Jamaican heritage more completely than ever before. This sensational novel – her first since the Orange Prize-winning Small Island, recently adapted for the BBC – tells the life story of July, a slave girl living on a sugar plantation in 1830s Jamaica just as emancipation is juddering into action. Levy’s handling of slavery is characteristically authentic, resonant and imaginative. She never sermonises. She doesn’t need to — the events and characters speak loud and clear for themselves.

The story is expertly fashioned around a metafictional conceit. The “editor”, Thomas Kinsman, explains in his foreword that the book was written by his mother. It’s a well-worn device, but here it has such conviction and idiosyncrasy that it feels irresistibly fresh. His mother, it transpires, is July herself, and so intimate is she with her “reader” that she might be leading them around the plantation by the hand. Her Jamaican lilt, which despite her son’s careful Anglicising retains the rhythm and syntax of her dialect, is unfaltering and immersive. And her seemingly artless testimony, which scorns “ornate invention”, is a masterclass in storytelling and self-presentation.

She begins with her conception — the casual molestation of her mother Kitty by the plantation’s vile Scottish overseer. It’s an “indelicate” way to open a novel, as her son argues in one of their endearing squabbles, but it’s indicative of her petulant, assertive style that she will not apologise for it. She is a woman “possessed of a forthright tongue and little ink”, and tells the reader plainly that if we don’t like her story, we can go elsewhere.

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As if we could! She goes on to relate how she was taken from her mother to “amuse” the master’s sister, Caroline. And by the time she reaches the advent of the Baptist war, we are so rapt by her story that laughter, tears and outraged splutterings tumble out involuntarily. One minute we are giggling as July cheekily sabotages Caroline’s grand Christmas dinner by swapping her Irish table linen for an old bed sheet, the next we are witnessing chaotic scenes of suicide, injustice and murder as the Brits try savagely to quell the rebellion.

Given that Levy is dealing with such a shameful chapter in British history, it’s perhaps unsurprising that her white characters are relentlessly indefensible and pitiful. For their cruelty, bigotry and dependency they are privately mocked and manipulated by their slaves. Caroline especially is ritually satirised for her petty prattling and social pretensions – one can almost see her “big-big batty” caricatured in Punch. Even Robert Goodwin, the new, young overseer who arrives in the latter half preaching “kindness” to Negroes, fails to uphold his fine principles, powerfully illustrating that abolition was neither an easy nor immediate triumph.

Slavery is a grim subject indeed, but the wonder of Levy’s writing is that she can confront such things and somehow derive deeply life-affirming entertainment from them. July emerges as a defiant, charismatic, almost invincible woman who gives a unique voice to the voiceless, and for that she commands affection and admiration. Levy’s aim, she says, was to write a book that instilled pride in anyone with slave ancestors and The Long Song, though “its load may prove to be unsettling”, is surely that book.